Mary Morris' new novel, Revenge, (PicadorUSA, 2005) is a riveting, psychologically complex story of female friendship, art and obsession. When a young painter with a tale to tell becomes the neighbor of a world-class novelist with writer's block, they become both muse and menace to one another. Michael Cunningham has called Revenge "compelling and darkly beautiful." Anita Shreve writes "I loved it. The writing is superb, and the tension Morris creates between Andrea and Lorette keeps the reader anxious...a beautiful example of the thread of literary suspense. Her fifth novel, Acts of God, the story of a girl whose father, an insurance claims adjuster, led a duplicitous life, was published in September, 2000 by PicadorUSA. Born in Chicago in l947, Morris moved East to go to college. Though she never returned to the Middle West, she often writes about the region and its tug. Morris likes the fact that there is more magnetisim around the shores of Lake Michigan than the North Pole. She feels drawn there and feel an affinity for Midwestern writers such as Willa Cather and Mark Twain who wrote their stories of the Middle West from afar.
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